What are judges for? What is the law for? A case of emails, mice and murder

The recent judgment of HHJ Paul Matthews in Frost v Giddens [2025] EWHC 3325 (Comm) is an interesting one for thinking about what it is that judges do. 

Read on for more about emails but, I'm afraid, only a little about either mice or murder.

On giving advice

Someone on X posted an engagement-bait-type question, but a good one: "What advice do you have for me for the new year?" One reply was this: "be skeptical of other people’s advice, which is very often aimed at rationalizing their own past choices, exerting power, or projecting their own concerns .... It’s in fact extremely [hard] to give another person advice apart from the banal and the obvious." 

To what extent is that reply true? Some thoughts below.

Sally Rooney's Intermezzo and Alan Hollinghurst's Our Evenings

Last summer, I read two books of modern literary fiction (by which I mean books of the 'in-contention-for-the-Booker-Prize kind'), namely Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I don't think these two books are often yoked together (other than perhaps on lists of prizeabile, so to speak) but, in my perpetual quest to produce useful book reviews, I thought it might nonetheless be worth making a little comparison of what I think are their strengths and weaknesses.